What a moment. The programmer of the Tomavistas festival wanted the ethereal past and the effervescent present to coincide. It was at 9:30 p.m. and in different scenarios. What to do: splash in the mud of nostalgia that Los Planetas had prepared to celebrate the 30th anniversary of their first album, Super 8, or witness that group of twenty-somethings who are about to rock it and are called Alcalá Norte? The people from Granada gathered around 10,000 spectators, the people from Madrid 3,000 and another 1,000 chose to walk the 100 meters that separated the two stages to snack on one and the other. The latter were the ones who made the most of the night.
Jota and Florent, the heads of Los Planetas, were 25 years old when they edited Super 8, the first long album of the Granada group. Most of those who attended the Tomavistas festival last night (in La Caja Mágica, Madrid) to celebrate the three decades of the most relevant album of the indie Spanish 90s, they were also in their twenties in 1994. Today, the lives of those on stage and the spectators (in their forties and fifties) are not as exciting and interesting as then and the lyrics of boredom and alienation from that time Super 8 They sound like a vaporous litany. It no longer hits that “and if everything is going so well, why this pain that I feel?” Yes that’s fine; and that “travelling through the sun in a new dimension” belongs to the universe of memory. Because yesterday there were children accompanying their parents and asking: “Dad, shall we play hide-and-seek?” “No, son, it’s dangerous with so many people.”
Jota himself took this exercise in homesickness with irony and said, at the beginning of the recital: “The Planets are better than the imitators. “After 30 years still alive.” Without Eric Jiménez on drums and without Banin on keyboards and guitar, Los Planetas sounded resounding and powerful in the complete review of Super 8. With the voice, this time, in the foreground. Jota owed it to us after burying the voices in the recording because of that absurd nineties inferiority complex with the Spanish language. And with a stellar Florent Muñoz, producing sounds with his guitar and masterfully playing his pedalboard. We tried to transport ourselves for an hour to the nineties, that decade where, as writer Chuck Klosterman says, “the worst thing you could be is a sellout, and not because selling out meant that there was money involved.” That was the foundation on which it was built. Super 8, for months later to give up, sounding on the radio formulas.
The Granadans’ concert proposed a staging without large montages. The four members of the group almost always in that thick purple light that they like so much and a screen behind that projected psychedelic motifs and the circumferences and the doll indie depressed that Javier Aramburu designed for Super 8.
Those who took advantage of the weak moments of Super 8 (which has them: These last few years, for example) to escape to the stage of Alcalá Norte. There they witnessed some kids ready to take on the world, a hungry band right at the vital moment where Los Planetas were in 1994. Brazen, naive, brave and with pop missiles like The kids, Elfo Street and that anthem that is now canyon life.
Los Planetas completed the 65-minute concert with songs not included in Super 8, but more or less from the time, like I prefer buns, New sensations o My little sister. And they left. “Thanks a lot. In 30 years we will be here. No one kills us,” said a sarcastic Jota. The Planets were always a group little given to looking at the past. They have reinvented themselves several times, they have always conceived their concerts as a celebration of the present, boldly playing entire new albums, and today they are much more independent than in 1994. Last night they chose to wallow in the past. It was good, but that’s it.
last night too they performed in Tomavistas groups like Publishers, The Hinds, Dinosaur Jr. or The Blaze, and today Phoenix, Bele and Sebastian, The Jesus and Mary Chain or The Ponds are expected.
